Listening to music or other audio material through headphones may reduce the listener's awareness of external sounds indicative of events in their surroundings, because the music or other audio masks the external sounds. Particularly this may be the case where the headphones have noise-cancelling functionality. This may be a problem if an important event occurs, for example the sounding of a doorbell, which might be termed an alert.
To address this problem, various solutions have been provided which detect an ambient noise, and if the noise volume is above a certain threshold, interrupt the audio to the listener's headphones so that the noise can be heard by the listener. Such solutions cannot detect that a listener has responded to an alert. If an alert repeats, then the interruption of the audio will also be repeated.